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The joint American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project developed the uranium and plutonium atomic bombs. Its success is attributable to meeting all four of the following conditions:[95] A strong initial drive, by a small group of scientists, to launch the project. Unconditional government support from a certain point in time. Essentially unlimited manpower and industrial resources. A concentration of brilliant scientists devoted to the project. Even with all four of these conditions in place the Manhattan Project succeeded only after the war in Europe had been brought to a conclusion. Mutual distrust existed between the German government and some scientists.[96][97] For the Manhattan Project, the second condition was met on 9 October 1941 or shortly thereafter. Germany fell short of what was required to make an atomic bomb.[98][99][100][101] By the end of 1941 it was already apparent that the German nuclear energy project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the German war effort in the near term, and control of the project was relinquished by the Heereswaffenamt (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) to the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council) in July 1942. As to condition four, the high priority allocated to the Manhattan Project allowed for the recruitment and concentration of capable scientists on the project. In Germany, on the other hand, a great many young scientists and technicians who would have been of great use to such a project were conscripted into the German armed forces, while others had fled the country before the war due to antisemitism and political persecution.[102] Whereas Enrico Fermi, a scientific Manhattan leader, had an "unique double aptitude for theoretical and experimental work" in the 20th century,[103] the successes at Leipzig until 1942 resulted from the cooperation between the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and the experimentalist Robert Döpel. Most important was their experimental proof of an effective neutron increase in April 1942.[104][105] At the end of July of the same year, the group around Fermi also succeeded in the neutron increase within a reactor-like arrangement. In June 1942, Döpels "Uran-Maschine" was destroyed by a chemical explosion introduced by hydrogen,[106] which finished the work on this topic at Leipzig. Thereafter, despite increased expenditures the Berlin groups and their extern branches didn't succeed in getting a reactor critical until the end of World War II. However, this was realized by the Fermi group in December 1942, so that the German advantage was definitively lost, even with respect to research on energy production. Controversies regarding alleged nuclear tests David Irving's 1967 book The Virus House claimed that some of Diebner's researchers had unsuccessfully attempted to produce fusion using conventional explosives and heavy paraffin as a deuterium carrier. Irving also describes a experiment in 1943 carried out by Trinks and Sachsse, which used a hollow sphere of silver filled with deuterium, imploded by conventional explosives. Again it was unsuccessful, no trace of radioactivity being produced.[107] In 2001, physicist Michael Schaaf authored a 2001 book about Nazi atomic research, which included suggestions that Heisenberg was a pacifist who tried to prevent development of a Nazi nuclear weapon.[citation needed] However, a 2005 book by Rainer Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe claimed to have located, in the archives of the former KGB in Moscow, Heisenberg's speech notes from the Harnack Haus conference of July 1942, revealing that Heisenberg was a strong advocate for development of a Nazi nuclear weapon.[108][page needed] [Place missing] [publisher missing] Retired Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch also recounted and corroborated the speech notes found in KGB archives.[citation needed] Karlsch alleged that Diebner's team conducted the first successful nuclear weapon test of some type (employing hollow charges for ignition) of nuclear-related device in Ohrdruf, Thuringia on 4 March 1945.[109][page needed] Karlsch quoted a purported eyewitness named Clare Werner, who claimed to have been standing on a hillside in Thuringia at the time of the test: Not too far away was the military training base near the town of Ohrdruf. Unexpectedly there was a flash of light. 'I suddenly saw something,' she said ... 'it was as bright as hundreds of bolts of lightning, red on the inside and yellow on the outside, so bright you could've read the newspaper. It all happened so quickly, and then we couldn't see anything at all. We just noticed there was a powerful wind ...[110][page needed] However, Karlsch himself has acknowledged that he lacked absolute proof for the claims made in his book.[111] Schaaf criticized Karlsch for displaying "a catastrophic lack of understanding of physics".[citation needed] Science historian Mark Walker also published his analysis[vague] in 2005.[112] In 2005 Karlsch and Walker published an article on the controversial historical evidence[further explanation needed].[113] In 2006 the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB; "Federal Institute for Physics Technology") concluded tests of soil samples from the area of the alleged test, summarizing the results in the phrase kein Befund ("nothing found").[114] In 2007, Karlsch, with Heinko Petermann, published a sequel to Hitler's Bombe, elaborating on issues raised in his first book: Für und Wider "Hitlers Bombe" (Münster; Waxmann). See also Chicago Pile-1 Copenhagen (play) Enriched uranium Hanford Site History of nuclear weapons Isotope separation Japanese atomic program List of countries with nuclear weapons Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents Los Alamos National Laboratory Manhattan Project Metallurgical Laboratory Norwegian heavy water sabotage Nuclear power in Germany Nuclear weapon Oak Ridge, Tennessee Operation Alsos Soviet atomic bomb project Tube Alloys Zippe-type centrifuge Bibliography Bernstein, Jeremy Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Copernicus, 2001) ISBN 0-387-95089-3 Bernstein, Jeremy Heisenberg and the critical mass, Am. J. Phys. Volume 70, Number 9, 911–916 (2002) Bernstein, Jeremy Heisenberg in Poland, Am. J. Phys. Volume 72, Number 3, 300–304 (2004). See also Letters to the Editor by Klaus Gottstein and a reply by Jeremy Bernstein in Am. J. Phys. Volume 72, Number 9, 1143–1145 (2004). Beyerchen, Alan D. Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale, 1977) ISBN 0-300-01830-4 Gimbel, John U.S. Policy and German Scientists: The Early Cold War, Political Science Quarterly Volume 101, Number 3, 433–451 (1986) Gimbel, John Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, 1990) Goudsmit, Samuel with an introduction by R. V. Jones Alsos (Toamsh, 1986) Heisenberg, Werner Research in Germany on the Technical Applications of Atomic Energy, Nature Volume 160, Number 4059, 211–215 (16 August 1947). See also the annotated English translation: Document 115. Werner Heisenberg: Research in Germany on the Technical Application of Atomic Energy [16 August 1947] in Hentschel, Klaus (editor) and Ann M. Hentschel (editorial assistant and translator) Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser, 1996) 361–379. Hentschel, Klaus (editor) and Ann M. Hentschel (editorial assistant and translator) Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser, 1996) ISBN 0-8176-5312-0. [This book is a collection of 121 primary German documents relating to physics under National Socialism. The documents have been translated and annotated, and there is a lengthy introduction to put them into perspective.] Hoffmann, Dieter Between Autonomy and Accommodation: The German Physical Society during the Third Reich, Physics in Perspective 7(3) 293–329 (2005) Kant, Horst Werner Heisenberg and the German Uranium Project / Otto Hahn and the Declarations of Mainau and Göttingen, Preprint 203 (Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2002) Landsman, N. P. Getting even with Heisenberg, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics Volume 33, 297–325 (2002) Macrakis, Kristie Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1993) Mehra, Jagdish and Helmut Rechenberg The Historical Development of Quantum Theory. Volume 6. The Completion of Quantum Mechanics 1926–1941. Part 2. The Conceptual Completion and Extension of Quantum Mechanics 1932–1941. Epilogue: Aspects of the Further Development of Quantum Theory 1942–1999. (Springer, 2001) ISBN 978-0-387-95086-0 Norman M. Naimark The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Belknap, 1995) Riehl, Nikolaus and Frederick Seitz Stalin's Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1. Oleynikov, Pavel V. German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project, The Nonproliferation Review Volume 7, Number 2, 1–30 (2000). The author has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70). Walker, Mark German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939–1949 (Cambridge, 1993) ISBN 0-521-43804-7 Walker, Mark Eine Waffenschmiede? Kernwaffen- und Reaktorforschung am Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik, Forschungsprogramm „Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus" Ergebnisse 26 (2005) |
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